Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! This was a much-requested reconstruction that was
surprisingly easy to do, so I thought I’d revisit and bastardize my favorite
Doors album as present to my blog followers!This is a reconstruction of
the unreleased Doors album Celebration of the Lizard, which was restructured
into 1968’s Waiting For The Sun.The
bulk of my reconstruction uses a superior needledrop vinyl rip of the album for
the best possible fidelity, and the title track is reconstructed from three
different sources to make a complete and dynamic performance piece as it would
have sounded like in 1968, superior to the officially released “work in
progress” track.

Upon entering the recording studio in 1968 to make their
third album, The Doors hit a creative wall for several reasons.First and foremost, they had simply run out
of material, having blown through their backlog of quality songs with their
first two albums in the previous year.Paraphrasing Robbie Krieger, the ‘Third Album Syndrome’ had affected The
Doors, who were thrown into the position of needing a new album to promote with
no songs immediately on hand, forced to compose new material in the
studio.A solution was to base their
third album around a lengthy poetry piece of Jim Morrison’s, entitled
“Celebration of the Lizard”.Originally
claimed to occupy an entire side of the LP, “Celebration of the Lizard” would
have included seven sections, some of which were experiments in noise to
accompany Morrison’s abstract poetics.Unfortunately, the piece was too abstract for producer Paul Rothchild,
who felt the band absolutely needed a hit single, and the band themselves
allegedly could not properly record the song to their liking in the studio.

Rothchild presumably convinced the band to abandon
“Celebration of the Lizard” midway through the recording sessions for the
album, which signaled a change in Jim Morrison himself to a state of drunken ambivalence.After his epic poetic masterpiece was killed
in favor of a hit single, he simply stopped caring about the album and turned
instead to alcohol and his own circle of followers who vied Morrison’s time
away from the actual members of The Doors.The only thing salvaged from the formerly-title track was its fifth
section, “Not To Touch The Earth”, which became its own track on the album,
which was retitled to Waiting For The Sun.The legend has it that the void left by “Celebration of the Lizard” was
filled with two songs chosen by the 10-year-old son of Elektra Records head Jac
Holzman.Unused filler from The Doors’
original 1965 demo, “Hello, I Love You” and “Summer’s Almost Gone” were rearranged
specifically to be a hit single and it’s b-side.It worked; the album Celebration of the
Lizard transformed into Waiting For The Sun, the band’s highest charting
album.But it was not the album that Jim
Morrison had originally wanted it to be.Can it now?

The first step in recreating Celebration of the Lizard is to
know what would or would not have been on the album.Obviously, “Celebration of the Lizard” would
have been the title track, allegedly taking up the entire second side.Although a studio run-through of the track reached
17 minutes in length and media outlets at the time claiming some recordings
incredulously amounted to 36 minutes, almost all of the performed live versions
of the entire track ran between 13-15 minutes.I propose that “Celebration of the Lizard” would have not exceeded 14
minutes in length, and would have been teamed with another song or two on side
B, which is how it is presented here.Also, we know that “The Unknown Soldier” and it’s b-side “We Could Be So
Good Together” would have been on Celebration of the Lizard, since it was a
single release from early in the sessions; while some speculate the b-side
might not have been included on the album, that is not a precedent set by
the previous two albums, where not a song was wasted!Studio documentation also shows that “Spanish
Caravan” and “Wintertime Love” were all recorded before “Celebration of the
Lizard” was scrapped, and were probably good contenders for the album.News articles at the time also place a cover
of “Gloria” as a contender for the album, although we must exclude this because
we simply don’t have a 1968 studio recording of “Gloria” to use on our
reconstruction (not to mention the band simply stopped performing the song altogether the previous year).There is also
speculation that Morrison’s spoken poetry might have acted as segues between
the actual musical tracks on the album; we must also set this notion aside,
since we simply do not have any spoken word recordings from the CotL/WftS
Sessions to use in this reconstruction (although this is certainly plausible for the following album, 1969's The
Soft Parade; maybe the poetry rumors were assigned to the wrong album?).Aside
from these six songs, that’s all we know for sure.In contrast, we are certain of what would not
be on the album: “Hello, I Love You” and “Summer’s Almost Gone”, which were the
title track’s replacement.

Because of a) the limitations of source material and b) the
unsurety of how the album would have sounded like aside from six songs, we are
left with a great leeway to reconstruct our Celebration of the Lizard.Here, I am essentially beginning with all of
the Waiting For The Sun album, dropping the two 1965 demo-originated tracks and
adding a rebuilt title track with “Not To Touch The Earth” reinstated.That leaves us with a nine-song 37-minute
album, enough to compete with the rest of The Doors’ works.I am also going to exclude the actual song
“Waiting For The Sun”, as no 1968 recording is available that lacks the 1970
Morrison Hotel-era overdubs.It is of
note that I am using the pbthal vinyl rip of the album, which is the best
version of Waiting For The Sun I’ve heard by far.

Side A of my Celebration of the Lizard reconstruction begins
with the ruckus of “Five To One”, taking the place of The Door’s usual
ruckus-opener tracks.Morrison’s
introductory lyrics to the track make the song the only real contender for
album opener.It is gently crossfaded
into “Love Street”.While we can’t be
certain it would have actually appeared on Celebration of the Lizard, it is
needed to release the tension from the previous track.Following is “We Could Be So Good Together”
and then the brilliantly-composed ballad “Yes, The River Knows”.Again, while we are unsure if the later song had
actually been a contender for the album, its inclusion here gives Celebration
of the Lizard a pretty large dynamic and stylistic breath, a quality I
appreciated the most about Waiting For The Sun.The stylistic breath widens again with the tribal “My Wild Love” (which
thematically certainly fits Celebration of the Lizard) and the side closes much
like its officially-released counterpart, with “The Unknown Soldier”.Side B similarly opens with the amazingly mysterious
“Spanish Caravan”, followed by the baroque-rocker “Wintertime Love”.The album concludes with the title
track.

Clearly, The Doors were not able to capture “Celebration of the
Lizard” in the studio as they had intended it; this is demonstrated by the only
known studio version, an extremely lazy and lackluster rehearsal, appropriately
subtitled “An experiment/work in progress”.This seems curious, as the entire piece was performed a number of times
live to sheer perfection.Why not use
direct soundboard recordings of actual live performances if they could only
perform it correctly live?Contemporaries such as The Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention had mixed studio with live recordings on albums proper and would continue to do so throughout the 1970s.This is the approach we will take on my
reconstruction of the title song: we must find other, stronger performances of
the seven individual sections of “Celebration of the Lizard”, while staying within the timeframe of the CotL/WftS sessions, and assemble them into the best track possible.Although Rothchild has claimed the track had
no cohesion, it seemed the obvious choice to push the envelope in that very direction and record each segment separately, piecing the song together.Admittedly, that
was probably not The Doors’ ethos, even though Rothchild allegedly forced them
to perform hundreds of takes of “The Unknown Soldier” in search for the perfect
take for a hit single.Here, we have the luxury to undertake what Rothchild could not—or would not—do.

My own edit of “Celebration of the Lizard” begins with
‘Lions in the Street’, taken from the studio rehearsal version.It is edited into a live version of ‘Wake Up!’
taken from The Doors 1968 Hollywood Bowl performance.Since The Doors refined “Celebration of the
Lizard” over time, we wish to exclude any anachronistic later-era live recordings
of the song.Thus a performance from
1968—the same week as the release of Waiting For The Sun itself—is close enough
to the album’s sessions to let us know how the refined pieces would have sounded like
in 1968, as opposed to 1970.This
crossfades into more Hollywood Bowl recordings of ‘A Little Game’ and ‘Hill
Dwellers’; the slight audience noise is excusable since the overall fidelity of
the recordings are a great match to the studio recordings.Following is the album version of ‘Not To
Touch The Earth’, segueing into the studio rehearsal versions of ‘Names of The
Kingdom’ and ‘The Palace of Exile’.The
result is an album hopefully more in-tune with Jim Morrison’s intentions before
Rothchild’s desire for a hit single destroyed it.And at the centerpiece, a strong,
nearly-fourteen minute title track that is a sum of the more passionate
performances of its seven pieces, constructed into a cohesive whole.So are you ready?The ceremony is about to begin…

This was requested a while back, and I erroneously thought
it couldn’t be done; turns out this was totally doable and a fun Thanksgiving project!This is a reconstruction of the three-times
aborted third album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.Human Highway was initially begun in 1973 and
scrapped; then a second attempt was made in 1974 after their triumphant tour,
but scrapped again; a final attempt to turn the 1976 Stills-Young Band album Long
May You Run into a full-blown reunion of the quartet was again
unsuccessful.This reconstruction attempts
to piece the most complete recordings from these three sessions into a cohesive
and finished album that would have been the follow-up to Déjà Vu.All the best source material was used, volume
adjustments made and crossfading used to make two continuous sides of an
LP.

1970 spelled the end of supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash
& Young.Succumbing to the egos of
four prominent singer-songwriters in their own right, the quartet disbanded to
allow all four members time with their own (ultimately successful) projects; namely the
illusive-anyways Neil Young, how had success with his solo albums and with
Crazy Horse.But the legacy and the
amazing four-part harmonies of CSNY begged for a reunion, and that is exactly what
was intended in 1973.Regrouping at Neil
Young’s Broken Arrow Studios in Hawaii, the quartet worked on new material and about half of an
album was rumored to be recorded.The
album was allegedly titled Human Highway, and Graham Nash even organized a band
photo-op as a possible album cover. But
the same old egos and preoccupations prevented the album from being finished
and the material was left on the wayside.Nash's contributions from the 1973 Human Highway sessions (“Prison
Song”, “And So It Goes” and “Another Sleep Song”) were rerecorded and released
on his solo album Wild Tales at the end of the year.

The following year, the music industry's cries for a reunion
must have drifted into their ears, as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
reunited for a summer and fall 1974 tour that showed the band in a harmonious
and energetic shape.Touring to promote
the newly-released greatest hits compilation So Far, the three-to-four hour
concerts allowed the quartet to showcase a number of new songs that would
theoretically constitute the Human Highway album, ready for another studio attempt.At the conclusion of the tour, the group
again assembled into the studio record Human Highway.But clashing personalities again got in the
way of the music, particularly Graham Nash’s refusal to sing a minor note inside a major chord.Neil Young infamously walked
away from the project unannounced after only less than half of an album was recorded.All of the Human Highway originals were later
rerecorded for the various members’ solo albums: Nash’s “Wind On The Water” and
David Crosby’s “Carry Me” and “Homeward Through The Haze” were rerecorded and used
on the duo’s 1975 album Wind On The Water; Stephen Stills’ “My Angel’, “First
Things First”, “As I Come Of Age” and “Myth of Sisyphus” were rerecorded for
his album Stills; the band’s version of Neil Young’s “Though My Sails”, dating
back to the 1973 Human Highway sessions, was released on his album Zuma.

By 1976 Human Highway was closed with no plans for construction, not surviving two
recording attempts.By this time, CSNY
had coalesced into two halves: David Crosby and Graham Nash continued their eternal
musical and personal friendship by recording their album Whistling Down The
Wire, while Stephen Stills and Neil Young continued their partnership stemming
back from Buffalo Springfield by recording the album Long May You Run.Legend has it that it was Neil Young who
invited Crosby and Nash to fly to Miami and add their vocals to the album that Stills
and Young essentially had in the can at that point, effectively transforming it into an
official CSNY reunion and attempt at a third album.It is noteworthy that both halves were
working on originals that had originally been written for the Human Highway
project, such as Crosby’s “Time After Time” and Young’s “Long May You Run”.Crosby & Nash added their backing vocals
to a handful of Stills & Young tracks, and the quartet recorded new
versions of “Human Highway” and “Taken At All”.To this day it is unclear why, but those two tracks were left on the
cutting-room floor and all of Crosby & Nash’s vocals were wiped from the
mastertapes.Long May You Run was
released as simply The Stills-Young Band, destroying any chance at a CSNY 1976
reunion album and the Human Highway was demolished forever.

My attempt to repave Human Highway is actually quite a
difficult one that unfortunately involves very fuzzy logic: what songs to
include?Graham Nash has been quoted
that there would have only been ten songs on the actual album, but in adding up
all contenders for the album, we have anywhere between 20-30 songs!Also one must examine the continuity of the
three session: as each recording session was abandoned, those possible tracks
were shifted elsewhere and thus Human Highway received a complete facelift each
time CSNY attempted to record it; by 1976, it probably wouldn’t have even been
called Human Highway!For this
reconstruction to be successful, we must ignore this continuity and hobble together
tracks from the 1973, 1974 and 1976 sessions as contenders for one excellent Human
Highway album, rather than making two—or even three—separate average to ‘pretty good’
Human Highway albums.

To build my Human Highway, we will have two guideposts: the
first being that the bulk of the album is to consist of the songs debuted during the
1974, which were: “As I Come Of Age”, “Human Highway”, “And So It Goes”, “Prison
Song”, “Another Sleep Song”, “Carry Me”, “Long May You Run”, “My Angel”, “Pushed
It Over The End”, “Traces”, “First Things First”, “Love Art Blues”, “Myth of
Sisyphus”, “Time After Time” and “Hawaiian Sunrise” (note we are including Nash’s
Wind Tales tracks since they were originally destined to be a part of Human
Highway in 1973, even though by the time of the1974 tour they had been released
as a solo project). The second
guidepost is that we must exclude the songs that only featured one member of
CSNY and focus on the tracks that had a studio recording which featured at least
three of the four members of CSNY.That
whittles our list down to only “Long May You Run”, “Human Highway” and “Pushed
It Over The End” featuring all four members of CSNY and “As I Come Of Age”, “First
Things First” and “And So It Goes” featuring three of the four members.I have also dropped “Pushed It Over The End”
from the running order, since it was essentially an average-quality Neil Young live recording
with CSN’s vocals overdubbed, and didn’t seem to fit onto my
reconstruction.

We only have five Human Highway songs thus far that feature
three or four members of CSNY.Next we look at
the songs recorded at the three Human Highway sessions that were not played during
the 1974 Tour: from the 1973 sessions, we can use the original CSNY recording
of “Through My Sails”, found on Zuma; the full CSNY version of “See The Changes”
from a 1974 rehearsal session; “Homeward Through The Haze” is allegedly the
only completed full CSNY recording from the 1974 sessions; and we can also use
the full CSNY version of “Taken At All” from the aborted 1976 CSNY
sessions, as well as an early mix of the Stills-Young Band track featuring Crosby & Nash’s vocals, “Black Coral”.That leaves us with our required ten songs,
but I included two additional tracks that featured two of the band members—“Carry
Me” and “Prison Song”—to round off the album to two approximately 20-minute sides.

The album opens with “Carry Me” from C&N’s Wind On The
Water.Although this track lacks Young
and Stills, I felt that without the song, Human Highway has no real strong
album-opener.Next is Crosby’s “See The
Changes” a full CSNY version found on the CSN box set.After Young’s “Through My Sails” from Zuma, we
have the Wild Tales version of “Prison Song”, again only featuring C&N.While there exists a CSNY rehearsal recording
from 1974, the tape is too degraded to be used here.I chose the Wild Tales version because,
honestly, “Prison Song” is the highlight of the album and an absolute necessity.“Homeward Through The Haze” from the CSN box
set follows, with the side concluding with the early mix of “Black Coral “
featuring all four members, found on the Carry On box set.Although the sonic characteristics of “Black
Coral” seem more “70s” than the rest of the album, it creates a solid ending to
Side A and can be excused because of the anachronistic nature of this
project in the first place.

Side B opens with “First Things First” from Stills, a solo
recording that luckily for us, also featured C&N.My own personal remix of the unreleased CSNY-version
of “Human Highway” follows, with “And So It Goes” from Wild Tales continuing,
which also features C&Y.The
prerequisite CSNY song suite is created here with the CSNY recording of “Taken
At All” from the CSN box set is crossfaded into the early mix of “Long May You
Run” from the first pressing of the Decades box set.Concluding the album is the “As I Come of Age”,
a second track from Stills to feature C&N.This Human Highway becomes a very solid and spectacular album, more idiosyncratic
and adventurous than either CS&N or Déjà Vu.Although it is a CSNY album that has 100% Crosby, 100% Nash, 83% Stills
and 66% Young, Human Highway is a road that now can be taken at all.